fol] 


Rural Populations 
and Agriculture 
in Mission Lands 


AFRICA 
ASIA 
& 
LATIN AMERICA 


By 


Margaret Wilson 


1928 
The International Association of 


Agricultural Missions 


THOMAS S. DONOHUGH, Secretary 
150 Fifth Ave., New York, U.S. A. 





The INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF AGRI- 
CULTURAL MISSIONS was organized on January 
1, 1920, by missionaries and others interested 
in agricultural missions at home and abroad. 
Twenty-five mission boards and other agencies 
are represented on the Executive Committee of 
the Association. 


The Association claims a place for agricul- 
tural missions in the program of missionary 
boards believing that such work should be re- 
garded as of like importance with medical and 
educational missions in the extension of the 
Kingdom of God. ~ 


The Association makes possible the linking 
together of agricultural missionaries in all parts 
of the world and the dissemination of infor- 
mation of value to rural workers. 


The work of the Association is supported 
solely by membership dues and voluntary gifts 
of individuals and organizations. It has no 
paid officers. 


MEMBERSHIP 

Subscribing Member ...... $2.00 
Contributing Member ..... 5.00 
Sustaining Member ...... 10.00 
Patron ose. salle hetero ssdalssecers 25.00 


OFFICERS (1928) 
Warren H, Wilson, President, 156 Fifth Ave., 
New York. 
Thomas S$. Donohugh, Secretary, 150 Fifth 
Ave., New York. 


Chas. T. Greenway, Treasurer, 156 Fifth Ave., 
New York. 





The Rural Populations 
and Agriculture 
in Missionary Lands* 





ERTAIN universal characteristics in agri- 
culture bind together the three great rural 
continents of Asia, Africa and South (or 
rather, Latin) America. Their contribution to 
world commerce is almost entirely the product 
of the soil, but the producer thereof is the vic- 
tim of his own conservatism or ignorance, un- 
able to prosper out of a trade which enriches 
some one else. Traditional or primitive in 
farming method, superstitious, illiterate, con- 
fined to a small piece of land in countries where 
Nature is foeman in the shape of heat, forest, 
disease, drought or flood,—the farming people 
of Africa, perhaps 100 million strong, of Asia 
numbering 700 million in equal area, of Latin 
America with over 50 million, are feeding the 
rest of the world. The present state of things 
is changing. Industrialism is invading these 
countries and bringing civilized changes and 
urbanization more rapidly than an education 
adequate to cope with them. 


The lowest phase of rural life is maintained 
by hunting and fishing. Desert dwellers sub- 


* Statistics have not been made available for these 
continents, in respect to their native populations. 
India has a true census of agricultural population, 
others are estimated by villages or families. Even the 
urban population is estimated in many cases, and the 
size of a city or town is a poor index of its rural 
or urban character. Where no rural estimate had ~ 
been made by observers, this study took as the be- 
ginning of urban population the town of 5,000 people, 
except when it was stated to be a farming center. 


3 


sist on animal life and the nomadic herdsman 
in the dry savannah lands adds a garden plot, 
tended by the woman. The true primitive agri- 
culturist in Africa, in aboriginal America and 
in Burma, Indo-China and Oceania, clears and 
burns the forest for his garden. Of all these 
farmers the greatest number, and with the larg- 
est families, are supported by ancient, intensive 
methods of farming, efficient but wasteful of 
labor. 


AFRICA 


A FRICA has 20 per cent of the world’s area 

and 8 per cent of its population. Includ- 
ing its eastern islands, the present population 
is estimated at 128,521,853. The land area ex- 
clusive of uninhabitable desert is nine and a 
half million square miles, giving a density of 
13 people per habitable square mile. The rural 
population is 89 per cent of the whole, or 114,- 
460,000 people. 

Civilized-country agriculture in tropical plan- 
tations and in white-immigrant ranches of East 
and South Africa dispossess the native of land 
and exact of him labor, without setting him the 
good example agriculturally that they sometimes 
profess to do. It does, however, undermine the 
primitive family method of agriculture and 
make the future of the African farmer a greater 
responsibility to his protecting governments 
than if he were left in sole productive use of 
the land. 


Of all the native agricultures, the North Af- 
rican is most intensive. 62 per cent of the popu- 
lation of Egypt are hard-working small farm- 
ers, with a great crop on irrigated land. 75 per 
cent of the north- and northwestern coast popu- 
lation are the farming Berber tribes with some 
irrigation and date, fruit and barley exports. 


4 








The native of the Sudan with adverse farming 
conditions begins to display the attitude more 
typical of Africa, of indifference to foreign 
commerce, and the Abyssinian farmer cannot 
be matched in exclusiveness. Everything is 
grown to feed and clothe the Abyssinian, and 
the farmer uses a plough with effective tradi- 
tional methods. Two-thirds of their people, 
however, the Gallo tribe, link them with the 
nomadic African to the south and east,—whose 
herds are a sign of wealth and a means of pur- 
chasing wives, but only reluctantly are their 
cattle sold to the trader. 


The great mass of negro and negroid Afri- 
cans are either herdsmen of this order or 
primitive farmers ;—they live either on the dry 
open steppe in a semi-nomadic way with a tem- 
porary homestead and a garden cultivated by 
the women, or as forest-denizens they gather 
in communal villages and supplement the abun- 
dant tropical diet with a hoe-type of agriculture. 
Great sections are subject to cattle disease and 
the tsetse fly. Invasions and scourges have 
helped to place the present native farmer where 
he is, peaceful and protected by a foreign gov- 
ernment, but subject still to slavery and chief- 
tain rule, as well as foreign exploitation. Forc- 
ed labor and emigration to the mines are de- 
vitalizing factors, but equally difficult is the 
problem of the cotton-growing native of Ugan- 
da, unused to sudden wealth, and the Bantu of 
South Africa, crowded out of his traditional 
grazing lands and squarely facing a white race 
prejudice. In many tribes the African warrior 
has associated the woman with the food-crop, 
and the European advisor must find him a crop 
which it is not beneath his dignity to raise. 


West Africa relies on the native “peasant 
proprietors” for its export crop and is keenly 


5 


aware of the need of crop improvement by 
educating the farmer. The universal primitive 
method of clearing the land by “shifting culti- 
vation” prevails here. The resulting defores- 
tation is its greatest drawback, for the native 
cuts away all but the food tree and burns over 
the land, then when fertility is exhausted by 
continuous planting, shifts to a new or idle 
clearing. In Southern Nigeria, enormous vil- 
lages prevail, and the native walks as much as 
ten miles to cultivate the plot apportioned by 
the chief. These people, the Yorubi, have a 
male-farmer tradition. Cassava, millet, maize, 
yams, fruits and forest products furnish the 
average native diet. The average of land cul- 
tivated for each family is only one acre. The 
native who keeps ‘cattle has from one to five 
per hut. The great handicap of the native is 
his lack of education away from the super- 
stitions that prevent his improvement of the 
farm crop, the selection and planting of which 
he has adapted admirably to soil and climate 


conditions. 
ASIA 


AB HE Continent of Asia has 30 per cent of 
the world’s area and 52.5 per cent of its 
population, but if Soviet Asia is excluded, there 
are in 18.4 per cent of the world’s area 48.7 
per cent of its people. The area as thus 
studied is 10,525,578 sq. miles and the popu- 
lation thereon is 862,676,932, seven times that 
of Africa in a slightly greater area. The 
density averages 82 persons per sq. mile (for 
all Asia it is only 58 persons per sq. mile). 
The rural population is 87.7 per cent of the 
whole, or 757,200,000. This includes a nomadic 
non-agricultural but stock-raising people of at 
least ten million in Arabia, Iraq, Persia and 
inner China (i. e., Tibet, Mongolia, and Sin- 


6 





: 





kiang). The typical Asian country is predomi- 
nantly agricultural and predominantly illiterate, 
with poverty, overcrowded farm land, debt and 
ancestral rather than primitive methods of 
farming. 

Most rural of all Asia is the Dutch East 
Indies. Java in 50,000 sq. miles has 690 people 
per sq. mile, the densest land mass in the 
world, but the-bulk of this population are agri- 
cultural peasants. Siam is also predominantly 
agricultural, all outside of Bangkok being en- 
gaged in procuring the two chief tropical foods, 
rice and fish, and Bangkok itself being full of 
absentee landowners. Rice is Siamese coinage, 
—with exchange value in real estate. 


The most urbanized country is Japan, 51 per 
cent of whose 60 million people are rural, but 
with a steady city-ward trend for a century 
past, the rate being as high as 4 per cent in 
the last recorded five years. However, the 
average farm of 2.5 acres is intensively culti- 
vated, and the farmer often supplements his 
income with sericulture. 


The largest Asian countries studied, China 
and India, have practically the same number of 
people, 318 million, if we accept for all China 
the conservative estimate (Chinese estimate is 
436 million), and they have the same proportion 
of rural, or 89 per cent of the whole. In India 
the farming population is 72 per cent of the 
whole or 230 million, and here the village life, 
characteristic of the Orient, is less compact or 
adaptable by reason of its feudal basis, than 
the Chinese village, which is rooted in Familism, 
or the economic cohesion of blood-kindred. 
China proper has 210 million farming popula- 
tion or 70 per cent of the whole. Her interior 
possessions are absorbing the surplus farm 
population, migration to Manchuria being 


7 


tripled by recent conditions and more than twice 
as apt to settle permanently. Urbanization in 
China and India is unstable, the village or fam- 
ily having a permanent hold on the worker 
temporarily forced out to supplement the farm 





KEY 


SRA 


Eos Agriculture 

PRR, Frimifive Agriculture 
WI SToch-raising 
MWY Husiting, Fishing ete. 


a) Manufacture 


income (which in China averages $25 a year). 
The average farm in China is 4.5 acres: in 
North China a grain crop is raised with plow- 
culture, in South China a rice-crop and horti- 
culture, with hoe-culture. The Chinese are ex- 
pert gardeners, but ignorant of extensive farm- 


8 








ing and crop improvement. The Indian farmer 
is less skillful in manuring, irrigating and care 
of his small holding, which averages 3 acres. 
But the rich alluvial soil survives neglect and 
wasteful methods of plough-culture. Both Chin- 


\ 


N 
\ 





ese and Indian suffer from lack of farm credit 
and obligation to the moneylender. 

The most primitive agriculture, with shifting 
cultivation, survives in the Malay countries, 
Burma and Oceania. Notable among aborig- 
inal farmers are the Philippines in the interior, 


9 


who terrace their mountainsides for an irri- 
gated rice crop. 


Land tenure is by squatter right in the Malay 
Peninsula,—nominally the property of the 
crown, who in Cambodia may take away a con- 
cession if the occupant has not tilled it. In 
aboriginal Asia and Oceania it has the features 
of Africa, tribal communism with a planter- 
native problem in the state of mutual adjust- 
ments. Freehold, with village and family con- 
trol of titles, prevails in eastern Asia. India 
has 70 per cent of her farm population under 
zamindari tenure, which is the control of large 
estates or areas by individuals or brotherhoods ; 
the rest of Indian farms are held direct from 
the state by petty proprietors or villages. 


Tenant-farmers and surplus laborers without 
land are a great increasing class in this part 
of Asia, and are the first class to leave for the 
city and industry. Twenty-eight per cent of 
the total Japanese farmers are tenants, and 25 
per cent of the Chinese farmers, but in some 
sections of China where industrial concerns are 
the great landowners producing their own raw 
materials, 80 to 90 per cent are tenants. Land- 
less laborers in India number 38 million or 17 
per cent of the farm population. Traditionally 
they formed part of the cooperative village 
system, paid in kind and free of the present 
hazard of poverty. Only 58 per cent of Korea’s 
farmers (who with their families are 82 per 
cent of the whole population) own their land. 


Cultivated land in Asia is a small part of 
the total, and not greatly increasing, for in- 
ternal communications are everywhere poor. 
Only 2 per cent of Sinkiang is cultivated, and 
only a quarter of China proper, which has a 
million arid square miles. Twenty per cent of 
Korea is arable, and 71 per cent forested. 


10 


Japan has 15 per cent in crops, 9 per cent in 
pasture and 48 per cent of its land forested. 
Deforestation is greatest in China of any coun- 
try in the world, one-sixth of its area needing 
replanting, but Arbor Day is observed in China, 
Japan and Korea. There is more cultivated land 
in South Asia,—19 per cent of Ceylon being 
cultivated and 30 per cent of India. Forests in 
southeastern Asia form much of their export 
wealth. 


Western Asia has a lower density and civili- 
zation and soil-culture of the reclaimed desert, 
where orchards, cereals, dates and the fat-tailed 
sheep are diet and wealth, and the farmer is 
fewer in numbers than the nomad and the trad- 
er. Afghanistan, with an enlightened rule, is 
improving a crop that brings a low export price 
because of primitive methods. Old well-systems 
and canals, a primitive hand-sickle and the ox 
to tread the grain are the characteristic method. 


The Near East agriculture is most conserva- 
tive in Asian Turkey, where 93 per cent of the 
population are a productive agricultural people 
on fertile soil, but left in pristine traditionalism 
of method by lack of railroads, schools, or ex- 
pert supervision. Only 10 per cent of Syria is 
cultivated, but the bulk of the population are 
small farmers released from the Turkish heredi- 
tary serfdoms and tithing crops; agricultural 
credits are being extended. In Palestine, a 
lack of irrigation hampers the farmer, but the 
movement of Jewish peoples back to the land 
has been a great impetus and has replaced with 
the farm colony the old absentee owner and his 
Arab serfs. 

The governments of most Asian countries 
are promoting the agricultural school and ex- 
periment station, but until communications are 
developed and the general literacy raised, pov- 


11 


erty will be the accompaniment of the civilizing 
influences, which have banished the old self- 
sufficiency and made the great rice-eating and 
rice-growing nations import rice for their own 
consumption. 


LATIN AMERICA 


HE area of South and Central America, 
Mexico and a portion of the West Indies, 
is 14.9 per cent of the land area of the world, 
and holds only 5.1 per cent of its population, 
or 90,501,676 people. The average density on 
this area of 8,560,468 sq. miles, is 10.5 people 
per square mile, as compared with Africa’s 13 
and Asia’s 82. However, South America has 
a density of less than 2 persons per square mile. 
The rural population of Latin America is 
72 per cent of the whole, or 65,530,000 people. 
The aboriginal Indian is outside the census; 
he is often averse to agriculture. The Indian 
of ancient civilizations has been absorbed into 
modern agricultural systems. The large one- 
crop plantation in tropical and fertile sections 
rivals in importance the great cattle-raising 
occupation of these sections. Certain likeness 
exists to Asia and Africa, as “shifting culti- 
vation” of the forest by the Indian, which in 
Colombia has a civilized counterpart in the 
stock-farmer who destroys the hillside forest 
and plants grass. Poverty, illiteracy and lethargy 
are characteristic of the great peon class. The 
Indians live by collective holdings in pueblos. 
The primitive plough, mule-threshing floor, and 
the machete are characteristic tools and meth- 
ods. Corn and beans are the diet, and there 
is a method used of fertilizing ground by rot- 
ting, burning, and burying the bean-vines. 
Mexico is the great diverse agricultural coun- 
try of this group, with the high agricultural 


12 


population of 11 million or 78 per cent of the 
total. Since 1910 the governments have made 
an earnest effort to supply the small farmer 
with land, credit and some rural and agricultur- 
al schooling. The independent farmer or ranch- 
ero has thus become a democratic wedge in two 
ancient systems:—the village communism 
which is the only system understood by the 
Indian, and the Spanish landlordship as a politi- 
cal unit of power involving the mestizo popu- 
lation in serfdom and perpetual indebtedness, 
and yet from its wasteful methods of cultivation 
realizing little profit to the owner. The great 
central plateau of Mexico with a high tem- 
perate fertility is the vital factor in her pros- 
perity and has been owned and cultivated since 
before the Conquest. The same is true of the 
Bogota tableland in Colombia, once the seat of 
the Chibchan Empire. 


In Central America the characteristic land 
features are forest and mountain and tropical 
heat, with a western slope of great volcanic 
fertility. Guatemala, Salvador and Costa Rica 
have prospered in coffee plantations, and Costa 
Rica by reason of its large number of inde- 
pendent white farmers, for the early invader 
there found few Indians for serfdom. Nic- 
aragua and Honduras have been retarded in 
agriculture by civil wars. As a rule these 
countries produce and export soil-products and 
have a rural population of 70 per cent of the 
whole. Panama is thinly populated and little 
cultivated, though very fertile. 


The West Indies have the densest population 
and are sources of labor supply on the continent. 
Haiti is unique among these fertile islands, 
with its African population, 252.8 persons per 
square mile, totalling 2,050,000 rural peasants 
who have possessed the former feudal planta- 


13 


tions by “squatter right,” the land untaxed, and 
its resources—richest of the West Indies— 
barely scratched. 


South America has great range of climate 
and civilization, from the temperate Argentine 
devoted to cattle-raising to the tropical Guian- 
as, which have a primitive American agricul- 
ture in juxtaposition with the European plan- 
tation. Dutch, French and British Guiana are 
alike in their narrow cultivated seacoast, with 
high steppe and forest behind, explored only 
by the miner. On the seacoast East Indian 
labor has been used in plantation labor since 
the abolition of slavery, and has resulted in an 
Oriental small-farmer class settled on their 
own land. The Indian in the interior cultivates 
the cassava root, sometimes using an axe in- 
stead of the machete to make the forest clear- 
ing. He plants the crop, which the woman culti- 
vates; he supplements this food by hunting and 
fishing. : 

Uruguay shares with the Argentine the 
leadership in prosperity on the continent. While 
the latter is entirely devoted to cattle ranches, 
now in the process of subdivision into smaller 
units, Uruguay, with 60 per cent of its land in 
ranch, wisely devotes 25 per cent of its area 
to mixed farming and ranching. 


Brazil, with the greatest unexplored forest 
land in the greatest river-basin of the world, 
has one-fifth of its three million square miles 
in farms, 650,000 in number, but only 3 per 
cent under cultivation. Immigrants have been 
induced to take the place of plantation slavery. 
Seventy-seven per cent of Brazilians and 48 
per cent of their immigrants are illiterate. Both 
the east and west coasts of South America have 
received large European peasant immigrations, 
in this manner, so that there is also an alien 


14 


farmer problem. Not only have state lands 
been thrown open, but estates have been sub- 
divided, as they were in Chile in 1857. Chile 
now has few estates larger than 2,000 acres, and 
one-third of its farms are 12 acres or less in 
size. 

The interior or mountainous countries are 
backward. Three-quarters of Bolivia is unde- 
veloped, its tin mining alone being notable, 
though even for that labor is unreliable. Half 
its population is Indian, only 12 per cent white, 
the rest mixed blood. The Indian subsists on 
pigs and cattle, and maize or Indian corn, the 
great food-crop of the continent. Paraguay, 
a backward stock country, Peru and Venezuela 
in the north have “wild” Indians and little civi- 
lized agriculture. 

The Argentine, Brazil, Chile and Uruguay 
have made legislative attempts at establishing 
an agriculture and an elementary rural educa- 
tion. Movable rural schools are being estab- 
lished in the cattle-raising sections and adult 
schools in Uruguay. 


ARRAS is a hasty review of agriculture in 
the lands so primitive or so congested 
with uneducated masses of people that they 
have called the missionary to their shores. 
Largely tropical, they furnish food for our in- 
dustrialized countries, but even when their farm- 
ers are not exploited they have not prospered. 

The educated African boy who is ashamed of 
his “farmer” father and the Latin youth who 
“would rather be a clerk” will hardly form a 
contented and efficient farming population in 
the future. 

The Chinese say that only the scholar exceeds 
the farmer in rank because the soil is holy and 
on the soil he is a creator. Some such dignity 
must imbue all agricultural education. 


15 





